The big bang

Page Tools

Handy but hefty ... in 1987 Telecom's briefcase-sized
Attache mobile was the way to go.

Ten years ago there were 6655 bank branches in Australia. Today
there are just 4888. Over the same time the number of bank tellers
has declined by half, according to the Reserve Bank.

There are no figures on visits to banks, but most likely they
have fallen by an even greater margin. Today every PC is a bank
branch, and we are all tellers.

Online banking is just one way technology, and in particular the
internet, is changing our lives. Consider what the world was like
in 1995, just a decade ago.

In that year, Microsoft released Windows 95, the first version
that worked as advertised. Labor was in power in Canberra, and out
of power in Britain. O.J. Simpson's trial in the US redefined the
meaning of justice.

Best picture Oscar was won by Mel Gibson's Braveheart. Carlton
won the AFL premiership (maybe it really was a long time ago), and
the Bulldogs stormed into the rugby league premiership from sixth
spot.

In 1995 Amazon was a small firm struggling to survive and email
was a novelty. Digital cameras and iPods didn't exist. Analog
mobile phones were clunky, expensive and unreliable. PDA still
stood for "public display of affection". The Java programming
language was announced that year, as was the first Sony
PlayStation.

Since then a whole range of new technologies and services have
come into being that have totally changed our behaviour and habits,
at work and at play. We are surrounded by electronic digital
devices. We buy our cars, do our banking and read our news online.
Newspaper circulations and cinema attendances are declining. Most
dating services, job ads, and encyclopedias are now online.

We can send and receive SMS messages from fixed phones, watch TV
on our computers, and surf the net and take pictures with our
mobile phones. Wireless communication is widespread, for voice and
for data, and the day of seamless integration of wired and wireless
networks is almost upon us. The internet, only a baby 10 years ago,
has matured. We rely on it and we trust it.

The key has been the movement of information from analog to
digital. Analog signals represent information as waves. All analog
signals are different, and storage or retransmission means an
inevitable loss of quality. With digital, all information is
expressed as zeros and ones, which means we use the same technology
for storing and transmitting all media and all computer-based
information. TV, CDs (and now MP3 players), DVDs and telephony all
employ a string of binary digits, called bits. Digital signals can
be stored, copied and retransmitted an infinite number of times
with no loss of quality and at virtually zero marginal cost.

The internet has been around since 1969, when the United States
Defence Department started connecting its research computers to
each other. But initial growth was slow and in the early '90s still
largely restricted to government and academic users. It was hard to
use, text based, had poor search capabilities and required arcane
commands to navigate it.

But in the late '80s Englishman Tim Berners-Lee worked out a way
to make the internet easy to use, by introducing a new naming
convention and the concept of hypertext. He called it the World
Wide Web. Suddenly, it became possible to search the internet, and
people began to build web pages for other people to look at.

Then in 1993 the US Congress changed the law to allow the
internet to be used for commercial purposes. That year also saw the
introduction of Mosaic, the first easy-to-use web browser. At about
the same time, PCs became commonplace in business and the home, and
data communications improved to the point where dial-up internet
connections were good enough to handle simple graphics - as found
on web pages - as well as text.

This classic combination of technological advances caused what
many people call an inflection point - when all the conditions are
right for a major new advance. Nobody really predicted the
explosive growth of the internet. As late as 1994, even Bill Gates
called it a transitionary technology "that doesn't even have a
billing system" (Gates is into billing systems). But the inflection
point hit hard in the mid '90s, leading to a frenzied tech boom and
some of the biggest changes we have ever seen in the effects of
technology on society.

Falling prices and vastly improved ease of use switched the
focus of technology from corporations to the individual, and to the
home. The biggest changes have been in personal communication - the
internet, the mobile phone and pay TV.

In April this year, research company Connection Research
Services released the results of a major survey into the digital
usage habits of Australian households. CRS interviewed more than
1000 households, and found that 65 per cent were connected to the
internet. More than one-third of these were on broadband, with the
proportion predicted to grow to half over the next two years. Ten
years ago less than 10 per cent of homes were on the internet. All
connections were dial-up - the concept of broadband didn't even
exist.

The CRS study also found that more than 80 per cent of
Australian homes have at least one mobile phone, and most own more
than one. Most homes have DVDs and a digital camera. They also have
multiple TVs, and 80 per cent have at least one computer. Home
theatres, driven by the plummeting cost of new TV technologies, are
now found in nearly 20 per cent of all homes, often in rooms
dedicated to the purpose.

For a glimpse at the future, look at South Korea. Nearly 80 per
cent of South Korean homes have broadband connections - and South
Korean broadband is truly broad. Most connections are at 2 megabits
per second (2Mbps) or higher (a typical residential broadband
connection in Australia is 512kbps). The South Korean Government
expects that 70 per cent of internet connections will exceed 20Mbps
by the end of 2006 and that most will be at 100Mbps by the end of
the decade.

At these speeds, and with this level of penetration, the
internet pervades South Korean society to an extent unknown in the
rest of the world. But with success come problems. In South Korea,
cyber crime is out of control, and a quarter of all teenagers are
classed as internet addicts, many with behavioural problems.

New cultural tools have appeared, such as "avatars", digital
characters used to identify yourself online. There exists in Korea
a digital world, of the kind predicted in Tad Williams's sci-fi
trilogy Otherland, which is as real to its inhabitants as the
corporeal world. Gangs of cyberyouths roam the net, stealing
cybergoods from unfortunate avatars and disrupting things.

There are other challenges. What is the future of intellectual
property when music, films and software can be transmitted around
the world in an instant and copied an infinite number of times? How
can we make the virtual world as secure as the real world? Can we
even distinguish real life from cyberlife?

In 2005, we already have the sub-$1000 notebook, the terabyte
(1024 gigabytes) of storage on our video recorder, and the video
camera in our phone. Ten years from now, everything we have now
will be cheaper, smaller and easier to use, and a lot more mobile.
The phone network, pay and free-to-air TV networks, and the net
itself will all merge into a larger network, which some are calling
the Supernet.

True broadband internet will let us reliably make telephone
calls (VoIP) and watch TV (TVoIP) on the net. It's all digital,
which means it's all about bandwidth. Forget ADSL - even the
much-vaunted ADSL2 is not truly high-speed broadband in comparison.
Broadband is best achieved with a fibre optic network, which will
reach most Australian homes by 2015. Within homes, a combination of
structured multipurpose cabling and wireless will keep us connected
- everywhere, all the time.

A lot has happened in 10 years. But the information millennium
has barely begun. The technological changes we are witnessing are
just the beginning - anybody under 30 today will see changes on
this planet our grandparents could not even dream of.

Over the next generation we will see the interconnection of all
devices at bandwidths incomprehensible today. We will see the
marriage of carbon and silicon, the merging of computers and
organic life. Fancy a terabyte of data at the base of your
brain?

How humankind adapts to these changes will determine the fate of
our species. The past 10 years are not even a dress rehearsal. A
good rule of thumb is - if you can imagine it, it will happen. The
only question is: when?

Five essentials

Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the web, says
he's looking forward to the day when his daughter finds a rolled-up
1000 pixel by 1000 pixel colour screen in her cereal packet, with a
magnetic back so it sticks to the fridge. That will happen and
probably sooner than we think.

Today we rely on technology to stay in touch and to do everyday
things in an entirely different way from how we did them just a
decade ago. Consider the following technologies and how they have
affected your life.

Mobile phones. Truly the communications
phenomenon of the decade. There are now nearly as many mobile
phones as people in Australia. How did we ever stay in touch
before? Text messaging is even changing the grammatical structure
of the language.

Digital cameras. Film is all but dead. Our
photo albums are in our computers - or our mobile phones. But will
we be able to show our grandkids? Electronic images are more
fleeting than those on paper.

Email. If you don't have an email address in
the information millennium, you are a non-person. Email and instant
messaging is how the world stays in touch. It's also the preferred
vehicle for viruses, spam and flaming (organised electronic
abuse).

Pay TV. OK, not a necessity, but it didn't
exist in Australia 10 years ago, and it's where the world is
headed. But pay TV as we know it today is a transitionary
technology - 10 years from now, it will be delivered via the
internet.

Online banking and shopping. The banks aren't
closing branches just to save money. The whole nature of banking
has changed, thanks to the internet. The net is a giant shopping
mall, where you can buy and sell anything. Amazon and eBay have
truly changed the world of commerce.